The Road not Taken and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

After Frost s father died in 1885, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student, but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote (but rarely published) poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (purchased for him by his grandfather), and supplemented his income by teaching.

In 1912 he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. A Boy's Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston. In 1924 he received a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for New Hampshire (1923). He received it again for Collected Poems (1930), A Further

The Road Not Taken Although I must admit that I am not a poetry fan, many of the poems of Robert Frost appeal to me, and this would have to be the one that appeals the most, in other words, it is my favorite poem. When I first read this poem, I liked it because of its free verse style (which I like) and its apparent simplicity, but, after much study, its true meaning became apparent. The obvious basic meaning is that the poem is about a person s choices in life. The narrator describes coming to a problem with the fork in the road. He must go down one but feels he will not be able to take back his decision. He looks to see the pros and cons of each choice, and then takes the one that he says the least had traveled. He leaves the outcome up to the reader and the sigh at the end can be taken as good or bad. This leaves the reader the choice of deciding whether it is better to conform with society or rebel like Frost did and take up a less stable trade.

The topic of death in many of Frost s poems is fast becoming a major literary topic found in many books and all over the Internet. In this poem, it could be considered that the narrator is wishing for his own death. This is likely the reason the last line is repeated twice. It gives the effect of sighing. The narrator wants to rest but he cannot, and the horse and cart are symbolic of this. They are the ones who bring him back to reality: the horse is reminding him to come back ( to ask if there is some mistake is telling the narrator to get back to reality) and the cart is what he sill must do (we know he has a cart because of the harness bells ). Also when he is near the woods, he is far away from the city, and the city is like a synonym for life and one of the opposites of life is death. Another closely related example of symbolism is Between the woods and the frozen lake . The woods are now a symbol of life a change from the previous example and the frozen lake, devoid of life, is a symbol of death. The final example of symbolism is an obvious one in which death is compared to sleep.

Some topics in this essay:
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